To the Mountaintop

in a striking departure from earlier books, Burns focuses on King's biblical faith and spiritual vision as fundamental to his political leadership. King is not portrayed as a lone exalted hero, but as the heart of a fabric of principled leadership that stretched from his closest colleagues to the movement's foot soldiers on the streets. This book stresses his shaping by other leaders - heroic figures such as Bayard Rustin, Ella Baker, James Bevel, Bob Moses, and Marian Wright Edelman - and his conflicted relationships with John and Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.